Teach Yourself Lightroom

Photoshop Lightroom combines the professional raw-processing tools in the more expensive Photoshop CC with the asset-organising powers of the cheaper Photoshop Elements. It also has plenty of unique photo-fixing and organising tools of its own, as you’ll discover while working through this book. One of the biggest challenges that we face as digital photographers is managing our collections of images. Lightroom enables you to take the tedium out of asset management. It provides easy ways to add keywords to batches of files as you import them from a memory card, so you can find specific images more quickly in the future. We’ll look at Lightroom’s asset management functions in more detail in chapter two. You may be dealing with thousands of images that are scattered across folders on your PC…

1 Choose a source Lightroom collects files from a variety of sources and displays them in its Catalog. After launching Lightroom, click the Import button at the bottom-left of the interface (or choose File>Import Photos and Video from the main menu.) An import window will appear. In the Source section, browse the files and folders and choose a source such as a memory card, your camera if it’s plugged in, or a folder of photos on an internal or external hard drive. 2 Check or uncheck? The assets in the selected source folder or memory card will appear as thumbnails. Use the slider to increase the thumbnail size for a closer look. All the files are checked automatically. You can tick Uncheck All and then manually check the thumbnails of…

It’s common practice to share your digital photos as electronic copies. You might do so by emailing them to clients, putting them on your social network site or presenting them in your online gallery. Once you’ve shared a photo you can’t control where it ends up, because it’s easy for others to make an electronic copy. This can lead to scenarios where your work is shared or published without you being credited or paid for it. As the creator of the image, you own the copyright to it, so others must seek your permission to use it. To help them do so you can assign your copyright details to the photo’s metadata. When your camera processes an image to describe its colours and tones, it also includes information about the…

Thanks to digital cameras, you can generate thousands of photographs in a relatively short time. Lightroom gathers images from multiple folders and external hard drives and stores a link to them in its Catalog. You might have to spend a long time scrolling through the Library module’s imported thumbnail images in search of a specific photo. The Catalog panel has the option to display all the photos in the Catalog, or you can narrow things down by clicking the Previous Import label to see your most recent additions to the Catalog. In chapter two we’ll look in detail at the ways Lightroom’s Library module enables you to organise your images using a range of tools and commands. However, we’ll pre-empt that chapter by introducing you to a quick and effective…

If you do a lot of studio-based shooting then you may find it useful to connect your camera directly into your laptop or desktop computer via a USB cable and import each photograph straight into Lightroom’s Catalog as you trigger the camera’s shutter. By tethering the camera to your computer and running Lightroom you can streamline the production stage of your workflow, because you won’t need to import a large batch of photos from a memory card later on. Looking at an imported photograph on a laptop’s larger screen or a monitor means that you can immediately spot problems such as a lack of focus more easily than you could if you were looking at the same photo on the camera’s smaller LCD display. This gives you the opportunity to…

In the previous chapter we demonstrated how to import images into Lightroom. We also touched on ways to organise your assets by placing them in Collections. In this chapter we’ll delve deeper into the Library module and demonstrate how it can help you to manage (and edit) your images. You may have thousands of photos to deal with, and they may be scattered across a variety of folders and external hard drives. Without Lightroom’s Library module, you’d have to rummage around in those separate folders looking for specific photos. Lightroom gathers assets together and places them in its Catalog, so that they are all under one roof. You can then see your images more conveniently in the Library module. On this spread we introduce the key panels and tools in…